The widow’s husband hid the last photo he’d ever taken of her, and smuggled it into the prison camp with him. What had been his life’s passion, photography, was now over, his equipment smashed in heaps of glass and black plastic, even his eyeglasses smashed in front of him under the heel of a boot. Twenty-eight years, they said. His sentence.
The sentence became his body. The photograph of his wife against his iliac crest.
It took only five years for the widow’s husband’s mind to wander in that prison camp, in ways that remind him of DNA drifting, or the disintegration of the stars.
After that, he began to have nightmares: a bloody torso inching its way along the frozen ground, a leg without a body being pulled by a dead horse. He wakes in the night as if waking were sleeping and sleeping, labor. A few days ago, he thinks, he may have met a man from a town he perhaps knew in his previous life. The man had stolen wood and was awaiting sentencing. Two days ago they had taken the man away. Yesterday he had returned. They had cut off one of his legs as punishment. The man’s leg looked like an enormous stick of bread, he remembered thinking. They brought it back with them and threw it out where it could be seen from the barracks. Fresh corpses were piled onto sleighs daily, and prisoners harnessed like horses would pull them with ropes, drag them several hundred meters from the barracks and pile them up as if for a bonfire. But never the leg. It was left to rot there in front of them, but not, freezing instead, not decomposing as an ordinary human leg might. It is strange what moves us and what does not.
My wife is not here.
And then his thoughts would fragment and tumble again.
Buttercups.
Entrails.
A boot.
A common treatment for frostbite was to hang a body, barely living, from the ceiling. One girl with sores all over her was hung by the armpits. One man, so starved and shrunken as to appear to be a boy, was hung by his feet.
Men would come and go in his barracks, either in his mind’s eye or in real time.
One was a writer.
With this man, he found bitter shared joy. He without a camera and he without a way to record his thoughts on paper. Art and ideas between them.
If he could produce a picture of their world, it would show hundreds of people curled fetal in their bunks like strange snails because scurvy had infected their joints. The white nights blew beyond thought. People reached the point where they had no sex, just the vague skeletal cage of a bodylike thing, mouths sunken in from lost teeth and disease, eyes glassy in their hollowed-out holes. He and the writer spoke many times of this imagined image. The writer absorbed it as a narrative.
One day the writer was taken away, and he did not see him again. His own strength faltered differently now. As with the loss of a lover or wife. He thought he saw him several times, far in the distance, in the night, the moon shining over a frozen forever delirium of cold. He thought he could see the writer framed by sky and the white of the snow, a skeletal figure, a stick man, harnessed like a horse, dragging the leg, with. . was it buttercups? Falling from the sky? All the images of his life blurring now into one.
How the body goes on living sometimes.
Did he forget himself?
The face of his wife. No, newspaper crackled and blowing across the frozen prison yard.
He finds himself standing exposed, as if shitting in a field in the hours of a long day’s labor, his genitals slowly sucking back into the cavities of his body, shrinking, retreating back. He is squatting, vulgar. He has no idea how long he has been this way. In sight the others are gathering wood, thistles, cones from the edge of a forest under the watch of armed guards. A soldier with a rifle, with a cigarette for a mouth. The rifle is perhaps less than five feet from his own dumb skull. He thinks he sees a flash of red. A woman leaning in to kiss the face of a lascivious soldier; no. A German shepherd dog’s tongue pink against dirty snow, licking a palm. A man’s penis pissing against dirty snow.
He dresses again. He looks out across white and on the white, peopled spots of black and gray and the hint of flesh. Faces? Holes for eyes and mouths. Is it a crowd? Fellow prisoners? Or just shapes? Trees?
He opens his mouth like it’s a shutter.
I was an artist.
I existed.
I made art.
The guard cocks a trigger in a perfectly synchronous motion. The sound prompts the man to join the sticklike figures nearly cracking from their own actions. He is now part of the still life: prisoners gathering wood.
He remembers washing a man’s back. The rag following the moles of his back as if they made some strange constellation, his own hand magnified to him, more than human, the man’s flesh taking the hand’s motions as a gentle whisper, like a woman’s gesture, a woman washing a body, he remembers the skin reddening where he rubbed. The giving over to love, isn’t it? The tiniest of gestures exploding like small compassionate bombs between them? Did he look upon the back of the man with longing? Where were the definitions of words going in this place? The black curls of the back of the man’s head, so black, so coarse, so like a forest that he wanted to rest his face there, calmly and without intention, as natural as putting a head to a pillow in bed at night with his wife.
And cupping his own elbows in the alone. Oh, to let go to death.
In his tenth year, he is scratching his name into a wooden plank in the wall — or thinks he is; the word he actually is scratching is Father—when somewhere nearby an elderly man, emaciated but for his oddly round and melon-hard belly, laughs out loud, a thunderous laugh, almost hideous. He does his best to ignore the monstrous laughing man, focusing instead on a single letter of his work. Finally he turns to the cackling jackal of a man and tells him to go fuck himself. Can’t the man see he is busy?
My dearest friend, the man says, I beg of you, forgive my intrusion. As it happens, I was just thinking that all my life has been given over to a pure insanity. You will wonder what I mean. In my case, it was science. Science! I have, as I say, given my life over to it, if you can believe the absurdity of that, the pursuit of that brand of knowledge in which the proven outscores the given. And at the age of seventy — at least I think that is the age, who knows in this place — it happened into my mind that the waste has not been these years in Siberia, but rather the years I spent toiling away in my lab, making “meanings” of things, working for the state believing with all my heart that physics was beyond anything, beyond patriotism or God, beyond the heart, the head, the concerns of the body, beyond any thought or drive. I am giving my life to the magnificent order of the universe, I thought, freely and with zeal! And when I saw you sitting there, friend, it reminded me of all my righteous-mindedness and idiotic sacrifice to the pinpoint world of microscopes and mathematics. He laughed again. Do you see?
In the time that he knew the old man, it seemed to him that there was not a single moment in which he was not talking. Narrating his knowledge, even in the face of its destruction and uselessness. It was as if an entire human history were pouring forth from his mouth. He believed himself to be dying, in fact, a cancer, yes, he was certain, his great and authentic big-headed knowledge of science assured him like second sight, even without his instruments, that his body was indeed being invaded, bombed, taken over, so to speak. Whether the old man was right, he hadn’t a clue. He only knew that he wished the old man would go on speaking forever, since he had discovered that his primary fear was that he was losing his aesthetic awareness, his ability to see pictures and chart the world image by image — he was afraid he was no longer a photographer.
Once he had dreamed of winning a prize, the prize. But that might have been a man he read about. He couldn’t be sure.